The chairs are being shuffled at the V&A. Not Charles II’s coronation throne or the Peter Ghyczy Garden Egg chair but the top seat at the trust. Sir Paul Ruddock steps down after his eight- year term as chairman of the South Kensington museum, and now the hunt is on for a replacement. The front-runner, The Londoner has been told, is Simon Jenkins.
Appointing Jenkins would mark a change of tack. Ruddock was a bona fide City boy, co-founding investment management firm Lansdowne Partners after previous work at Goldman Sachs. His background has served him, and the V&A, rather well: he has been a prolific fundraiser for the museum and has himself donated more than £6 million.
Meanwhile, Jenkins, a former editor of this newspaper, is a Kensington resident, design aficionado and V&A regular. He seems like the perfect fit. That is, of course, if the Government plays ball and doesn’t take umbrage at Jenkins’s final speech as chair of the National Trust.
Last month Jenkins stepped down from the NT with a pointed jab at the Government’s relaxation of planning regulations, recalling how he watched “in horror, as sensible reform became what I can only describe as a developers’ ramp”.
The V&A is sponsored by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport and the PM rubber-stamps all trustee appointments. The V&A is proving coy: a press officer told us that there is nothing to report for now.
As for Jenkins? “It’s news to me,” insisted the eminence grise last night, with all the polish of a fine Chippendale chair.
Who will reach their three-year goal first... Balls or Osborne?
Countering the Autumn Statement is not the only test playing on Ed Balls’s mind. Speaking on Good Morning Britain, the Shadow Chancellor announced he is taking his Grade 4 piano exam tomorrow. “My aspiration, by the time I’m 50: can I get to grade 8?” said 47-year-old-Balls. Meanwhile, George Osborne’s three-year goal is to end the budget deficit. Who will get there first?
BBC tempers flare against The Sun
Has Auntie got a new set of teeth? Stoic for years in the face of criticism, the BBC has bitten back at the Sun on its Media Centre website after the newspaper slammed the Corporation in its last two editorials. “Top bosses hand other top jobs to friends, or friends of friends,” claimed the Sun yesterday, “all on salaries beyond the wildest dreams of the mere mortals forced to fund them.” The BBC wasn’t having that: “Our salaries are 20-80 per cent less than in the commercial sector,” it responded in a point-by-point takedown. And there’s more where that came from. “If people take a swipe at the BBC we’re not going to stand back and let it go unchallenged,” an insider vowed. “That might have happened in the past but it won’t any more.”
Nigella whips them into shape
Even in Times Square, cookbook queen Nigella Lawson stands out. She is in New York to launch a new series of The Taste, in which she is a mentor with US chef Anthony Bourdain.
Lawson has gained a legion of fans in the US, and has even appeared in its most popular comedy, Modern Family, in which she voices a cameo when character Phil Dunphy uses an app that gives cooking instructions via audio.
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Her tips for lemon meringue pie have clearly left quite an impression. “There was so much whipping and beating I had to pull over,” says Dunphy, breathlessly.
Hot topics at the Bad Sex award
To the Army and Navy Club in St James’s, where a raucous crowd, including economist Vicky Pryce, Tory MP Ben Gummer and über-dandy Nicky Haslam, gathered for the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction award.
“Just when you thought bad sex couldn’t get any worse, in comes a vicar with a past,” laughed pop star-turned-priest Richard Coles, who was there to award the prize to sadly absent Ben Okri for his novel, the Age of Magic. What was the ex-Communards keyboardist’s personal first foray into erotica? “The Godfather,” the Rev Coles told The Londoner. “I think it was page 27 that every schoolboy’s copy would fall open to, where Sonny Corleone takes the bridesmaid.”
And what first got philosopher A C Grayling hot between the pages? “When I was young,” recalled the leonine professor, “if you couldn’t get hold of something contraband like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the thing that every teenage boy read was the [historical romance] Angélique books, which had vague descriptions of intercourse, from which we’d desperately try to work out what it was about.”
Can you have good “bad” sex in real life? “Impossible,” said Grayling. “Even when you’re having ‘bad’ sex, it’s still better than almost anything else you could be doing.
Sharp wit from George
George Osborne is sharpening his wit. Expressing support for the ExoMars mission the Chancellor fixed his eye on the Labour bench during his Autumn Statement, saying: “We on this side of the House have often gazed at the barren, desolate wastelands of the Red Planet. We have long given up hope of finding intelligent life there. But signs of any life would be a major advance.” Touché.
Churchill’s going cheap
Boris Johnson’s biography, The Churchill Factor, was released to fanfare in October priced at a hefty £25. Now, just six weeks later, it is already being sold half-price at Waterstones and for just £11 on Amazon.
Could the reason be the savage New Statesman review by Cambridge professor Richard J Evans, who pointed out that Johnson claimed the Germans captured Stalingrad (they didn’t) and that Croatia was ruled by “some Ustasha creep” in the interwar years (it wasn’t)?
At least Johnson now has some new facts: a week after The Churchill Factor came out he was given a copy of Victor W Germains’s The Tragedy of Winston Churchill. This rare 1931 biography is valued by Amazon at more than £100. It’s good to see one biographer’s efforts still command a high price.
Trekkie of the day: In The Times, Libby Purves observes that George Osborne “looks more like Mr Spock with every haircut”.
